The aristocracy

Abstract

Abstract The Roman senatorial order was the principal model to which the medieval aristocracies of western Europe looked, because it had been founded on the ownership of land, embodied the concept of nobility, and linked prestige to the exercise of political power and ancient lineage without excluding the promotion of homines novi. But it was especially in Italy (and this was only an apparent paradox) that the early medieval aristocracy rose from the end of the old senatorial order. By 500 AD the Italian aristocracy had a much more conservative profile than its western European counterparts, where senatorial families had by that time cohabited for generations with the military elites of the barbaric tribes that had settled in the former Roman provinces.

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